How the Internet, Social Media, and Smartphones are Dividing and Conquering Our Consciousness

Psychologists have come to some quite disturbing conclusions about how staying connected is tearing us apart. We spoke to a couple of authors whose new books illuminate our way out of the dilemmas that have arrived with cyberspace.

Best-selling science writer and Emotional Intelligence guru Daniel Goleman is trying to get his head around some fresh numbers I've cited from a new Harris Interactive poll: Nearly 20 percent of smartphone owners ages 18 to 34 report having used their phones while having sex.

"I don't get how they do that. You know," Goleman adds drily from his phone in Martha's Vineyard, ever the analytical rationalist, "they didn't ask all the questions that follow from that data point."

Indeed. But regardless of whatever else they signify, the Harris results illuminate a growing concern that Goleman addresses in his new book, Focus (Harper), out this month: For all its convenience and obvious advantages, our pervasive connectivity via smartphones and the Internet, he argues, is fragmenting our attention, stressing us out, and compromising our quality of life.

"I noticed, in the last two or three years," says Goleman, who has a PhD in psychology from Harvard, "an explosion of studies about attention, and I felt that there was a new and important understanding emerging that this is a human skill under attack, under siege, in all our lives."

When I point out that we all seem quite deeply enamored of our wireless mobile devices, Goleman readily concurs that they're addictive. "But what we don't notice," he adds, "is the cost to what's happening in the present, what we're supposed to be paying attention to, or what it does to our relationship with the person we're with, who we're now ignoring." He says people shouldn't dine together with their phones out, for example, because "studies have shown that this creates a kind of background anxiety that the other person's phone is going to ring and they're going to tune you out. It's actually socially hurtful, and it activates a center in the brain for social rejection." (A third of all adults in that Harris poll, by the way, reported having used their phones while on dinner dates.)

When I speculate that people might just get used to it, Goleman replies, "Abused spouses get used to it too—that doesn't mean it's good. I think we're going to have to become more intentional about putting limits on social media, on how they intrude into our lives, our relationships, and our interactions."

Goleman sees our workplaces as similarly afflicted. Far from finding humming hives of harmonious activity, he writes, recent workplace surveys reveal two main groups: those who "daydream, waste hours cruising the Web…, and do the bare minimum required," and those whom all this connectivity leaves "stuck in the state neurobiologists call frazzle, where constant stress overloads their nervous system with floods of cortisol and adrenaline"—making them prime candidates for job burnout.

And of course this whole experiment in universal connectivity—in which we're all guinea pigs—is only just getting started. Google Glass, anyone? The single categorical imperative of all social media, moreover, from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and Pinterest, is to draw as many eyeballs as possible to the mesmerizing pageant of cyberspace—to set those legions of smartphones constantly abuzz with hyperactivity.

But perhaps you suspect Goleman is being something of a Chicken Little—sure, people should try to be polite about their texting and calling and tweeting and posting and following. And of course they shouldn't attend to their smartphones while driving (oops—the Harris data again: 55 percent of respondents admit to doing so). But beyond that, you might be thinking, Hey—leave my phone and me alone, okay? I harbored similar feelings toward last year's iDisorder (Palgrave Macmillan), by psych prof Larry Rosen, which cleverly compares our technological obsessions with clinical disorders: solipsistic self-absorption, compulsive and addictive and panicky behavior, and so on. Then, as I was digging into this subject and becoming more aware of the issues involved, I realized my 13-year-old daughter had started keeping her smartphone and iPod in her room to, um, charge overnight. Hmm…. When I informed her at bedtime (bad move!) that I wanted to charge all our devices in the kitchen henceforward, she suddenly wailed, in evident panic, "Dad! You can't do that! What if somebody dies overnight?" Somewhat stunned by her vehemence, I replied, even as I realized it's just the kind of thing that makes kids hate their parents, "Well, at least you'll have gotten a good night's sleep before you find out." New rule: device-free bedrooms at night! And maybe Rosen's not so very far off the mark.

The truth is, research is yielding a broad consensus among psychologists that the issues Goleman and Rosen raise are far more problematic than we may wish to think. Recent experiments and studies have persuasively demonstrated that our culture's widespread embrace of the concept of multitasking is unrealistic and unwise; that the fragmentation of our attention by a proliferation of interruptions comes with profound psychological and emotional costs; and that the more responses required of us by the stream of prompts and temptations that wash over us from the digital ocean, the more our willpower, our judgment, and even our emotional well-being are diminished. We could do worse than to come to terms with these claims—and then consider the best advice psychologists have for how to become "more intentional" about our relationship with the digital world.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is a historian of science and futurist with a résumé that includes stints at Stanford, Microsoft, and Oxford. The title of his very readable first book, also just out: The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul (Little, Brown). Pang is here to tell us—and he's backed up by Goleman, Rosen, and plenty of data—that the wildly popular notion of "I'm on it, I got this" multitasking is a snare and a delusion. There's basically no such thing as parallel, or simultaneous, tasking (a reality all too vividly illustrated in accident statistics, at the cost of too many lives). What we're really doing is serial- or switch-tasking—and in terms of efficiency or productivity alone, it's a total disaster. The irony, as Pang tells me on the phone from California: "People who do a lot of multitasking think they're really good at multitasking—there's a self-defending quality to it."

As Pang recounts in his book, UC Berkeley psychologist Megan Jones elegantly demonstrated to him the cost of switch-tasking: She asked him to count from one to 10 as quickly as he could: It took him 1.5 seconds. Then she had him recite the alphabet from a to j—another 1.5 seconds. Then she asked him to alternate: "One, a, two, b, three, c…." That took Pang 9.5 seconds—three times as long as the separate sequences put together (do try this at home). How does this phenomenon translate in real-world terms? Studies have found that office tasks take about a third longer when interrupted by e-mail, and that it takes workers an average of 22 minutes—and not infrequently as much as two hours—to refocus on a task after being distracted by e-mail.

Pang does wish we had clearer terminology to describe what we call multi-tasking, because the steps that you juggle in orchestrating an integrated project—preparing a gourmet meal, say—can cumulate in deep satisfaction and create meaning in your life. But fielding clients' and colleagues' just-one-more-quick-question e-mails, urgent phone calls from your children, and SOS-level requests from your boss—all in real time? Stop kidding yourself—that's nothing but being nibbled to death by ducks.

The broader indictment of how the digital world fragments our attention starts with positive psychology's notion of flow—the term that Mihály Csíkszentmihályi bestowed in the 1980s on his model of our most profoundly meaningful and fulfilling mental state: when our attention is so focused and absorbed in an activity that we become unaware of the passage of time. Flow embodies "the idea that your focus and attention define who you are, very much in a moment-by-moment sense," Pang says. "If you can't control your attention, you're a little bit less yourself. That has all kinds of consequences for both how your life feels immediately and how it's going to unfold over the long run." He concludes, pointedly, "It's hard to make that kind of meaning when you're being pulled in lots of different directions."

Moreover, it's pretty obvious that a seemingly endless series of stressful stimuli perpetually knocking us off balance is likely to take an emotional toll—think of Goleman's frazzled worker bees. Yet perversely, we actually crave the incoming string of pings. Each one brings with it a little gift—a hit of the neurotransmitter dopamine to massage our brain's pleasure and reward centers, Pang tells me. As the ping traffic rises, however, so can our stress level, and the dopamine rush diminishes. Still, we're addicted enough that we're at least partly blind to just how dysfunctional it is to live like this. "I'm struck by the fact that one of the clinical symptoms of depression is an inability to concentrate," Pang points out. "Anything that's a symptom of clinical depression is probably not something you want to run toward."

That addictive impulse for more stimuli sets us up for a final, and deeply ironic, connectivity catch-22. It's not hard to intuit that, as Goleman writes, "The chronic cognitive overload that typifies so many of our lives seems to lower our threshold for self-control. The greater the demands on our attention, it seems, the poorer we get at resisting temptations." What might be less obvious is that this dynamic also works the other way. A classic series of psychology experiments has clearly demonstrated that exercising impulse control—resisting temptation, or agreeing to do something we feel a visceral antipathy for—reduces our stamina when we attempt subsequent mental tasks and degrades our decision-making abilities. In other words, even when you resist the urge to reach for your smartphone or click on your e-mail window (and computer users have been found to switch between various windows and applications, on average, 37 times an hour), you're still psychologically compromised by the very fact of their availability!

But don't despair: These insights can directly inform how we go about reconfiguring our relationship to connectivity—how we manage our love affair with our phones and rearrange how we use our computers. We owe it to our sanity to do so, and we'll be happier, saner, and more productive for it.

So where do we start? With ourselves, of course. "Recognize first of all," Pang says, "that your own time and attention are incredibly valuable, and second, that a lot of those people who want your attention would be better served by waiting a little while"—when you're in a better frame of mind and able to give them more of your attention.

Next? Your beloved phone. "These devices are a bit like evil, self-centered four-year-olds," Pang says. "They want your attention all the time. When they want you to look at something, they want you to look at it right now. They have no sense of social boundaries." Ideally, he says, you want your phone to behave like a CEO's executive assistant—protecting you from interruptions and trivialities. So make it your mission to socialize the thing and potty train it, manipulating the controls that phones afford you nowadays to minimize how and when it pesters you, and limit the list of people to whom you give the right to demand your attention. Your smartphone is your constant companion, and you very much need to control the relationship.

"It's not a bad thing," Pang says, "to help your technology grow up a little, to become a little more socially savvy, a little more mindful of you, so you can be more mindful while using it."

Your computer is less like a companion than it is an environment. You need to think about how you can shape that place to be most pleasing to you and help you reach your productive potential. Click here for a listof innovative software that Pang recommends in his book—programs that can do everything from altering what appears on your screen, to scheduling and limiting your e-mail alerts or access, to controlling your Internet compulsions. The programs that most stringently limit your options for distracting yourself and procrastinating can rescue you from that catch-22 of resisting the temptation to click into other windows but paying the price in reduced mental stamina.

Finally, many writers who have thought about connectivity recommend regularly disconnecting. Turning off. Unplugging. Going dark. Devoting precious time to your flesh-and-blood loved ones. Following your bliss—away from the digital stream, at least once in a while. Don't worry—it'll still be there when you get back. I promise.